Reclaiming the Desert

Sam Huntington’s "Clash of Civilizations" thesis, though
flawed, provoked international affairs specialists to see world politics in new
ways. In particular, it roused new interest in religion and culture as factors
in conflict. On the role of religion in international politics, the serious
work came from others like Douglas Johnston, Cynthia Sampson, Jean Paul
Lederach, and Daniel Philpott.

Violence along the Sunni-Shi’a Divide

In regards to Islam, there’s been much criticism about Huntington’s
thesis inflaming “Islamophobia,” because of its emphasis on the tension between
Islam and the West. But the more evident problem is Huntington’s blindness to
fissures within Islam, beginning with the failure to recognize the Sunni-Shi’a
divide. When it comes to religious conflict, everywhere in the Muslim world the
Sunni slaughter of Shi’a and other Muslim minorities, including pacific sects
like the Sufi, outweighs the toll of other victims (although in a post-United
States Iraq, Sunnis have repeatedly been the victims of Shi'ite militias.)

The
Sunni-Shi’a divide is found in the growing conflict in the Gulf between the
Saudis and the Iranians and the strategic differences between the Saudis and
Iraqis on how to combat the Islamic State. Similarly, Huntington’s homogenous
view of Islam overlooks the more specific sources of jihadist violence in
tribal Islamic societies.

The jihadist
terrorist threat comes in two forms. The first is the brutally militant variety
we see in the Islamic State (ISIL), al-Qaeda, al-Shebab, and Boko Haram. The
second, more insidious form is found in the missionary Wahhabism generated in
Saudi Arabia. The Desert ExperienceIn recent years, as the Houthis swept over Yemen, as the
Tuareg rebellion overran northern Mali for a time ravaging Timbuktu, as Boko
Haram terrorized northeastern Nigeria, I have thought of the waves of
puritanical North African marauders who overran al-Andaluz, the medieval Muslim
caliphate of Cordoba, imposing an increasingly rigorous version of Islam on the
tolerant, cultivated life pioneered by the Umayyad caliphs.

What today’s modern Muslim
movements have in common with the medieval Almoravids and Almohads, both Berber federations,
is that they are rooted in less literate tribal groups on the periphery of
Muslim society, whose tribal values conflict with those of Muslim
city-dwellers. Boko Haram, whose name literally means “Western Education is
Forbidden,” embodies this rural religious and cultural hostility to settled,
cultivated peoples. The harsh desert life and endless tribal warfare fosters
militant, ascetic, xenophobic reformers.
In his book The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War
on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam, Akbar Ahmed has examined this
scenario with respect to his native Pakistan and more specifically the mountainous
tribal region of Waziristan. In pointing to the tribal origins of today’s
Islamic radicalism perhaps Ahmed comes closer to identifying the sources of
contemporary jihadist violence than Huntington did in his clash between the
West and the Rest.

How the
world can respond to tribal jihadism is a difficult issue. Undoubtedly,
policing by the military will be necessary to protect neighbors from groups
like ISIS and Boko Haram, and it may be necessary as well to suppressing those
forces. But, in the end, military defeat will not overcome the temptation to
radicalize from tribal areas. In the long run, cultural and religious methods
will be better suited to neutralizing the threat of tribal jihadism in the
long-term. The Saudis have had
considerable success with de-programming radicals from their own society, even
as wealthy individuals within the kingdom support that radicalization elsewhere.
How such de-programming could be adapted to jihadis from more remote areas such
as the Tuaregs in Mali, the Houthis in Yemen, or the tribals in Waziristan is
hard to imagine. Could there be a present-day Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Muslim
Gandhi, who preached nonviolent struggle in India’s Northwest Frontier against
the British Raj? It does not seem likely, but a long-term peace depends on finding
just such a dramatic alternative.

The threat of Saudi funding of
missionary jihadism, however, is a different and even more intractable long-term
threat. The spread of radical Islam rests on Saudi support of Qur'anic schools
and the establishment of Wahhabi mosques around the world. Could the educational mission
be turned to include broader forms of secular learning, a solution that seems
antithetical to Wahhabism? Can the funding sources be cut-off? Could the Saudi Kingdom be effectively sanctioned for exporting this xenophobic-style of
education? Probably not. But overcoming jihadism without addressing the
challenge of missionary Wahhabism does not seem possible. In that respect, US
anti-terror policies are totally inadequate, and as a result even coalitional
military ventures are likely to prove futile with only fitful, temporary
successes.